This invention relates to a method and system of automatic operation of a plant, and more particularly to a method and system of automatic operation of a plant wherein the running operation procedures of the plant are described in tables thus enabling the automatic operation by using a digital computer of the business type.
The invention is suitable to the control of the automatic operation of a plant of a large scale. For the purpose of description, although the following description is made in terms of a steam electric power generating station it should be understood that the invention is also applicable to other type of plants such as nuclear power electric generating stations as well as chemical plants.
With the recent development of the digital electronic computer system (hereinafter merely called a computer) computers have been widely employed for the automatic operation and supervision of plants and the field of application thereof is widened year after year.
A steam electric power generating plant (hereinafter merely called a plant) generally comprises such principal machines and apparatus as a boiler, steam turbine, generator, transformer and circuit interrupter and a number of auxiliary machines and apparatus. In order to maintain the running state of the plants at the best condition it is necessary to operate these various component elements to meet the requirement of the running state of the plant which varies from time to time by taking into consideration the characteristics of the component elements and the running operation standard of the plant. Accordingly, in order to adequately operate a steam electric power generating plant it is necessary to predetermine the most suitable operation and timing for the state of the plant at various times based on the characteristics of the component elements of the plant as well as the running operation standard. For manual operation of the plant, the required running operations are generally performed by judging the state of the plant and the timing in accordance with the running instruction.
The methods of automatic operation of a plant can generally be classified into three types, viz (1) a subloop control, (2) a wired logic or sequence control and (3) a computer control which can be outlined as follows: